Best Wife Ever

I ventured out this morning to buy beer for the Super Bowl (Indiana has blue laws). I found a mini log of velveeta so I caved in and bought it for Jim under the condition he eats it all by midnight Sunday. Gross.

The Icy Aftermath

Finally, the kids went back to school today. The schools said that they had to remain closed through today because of the horrible task of getting the ice cleaned off the sidewalks so the children and teachers could enter safely. I do have to say that the city has done a great job getting the ice off the roads. The most trecherous street is the one that runs in front of our house. After that, it's pretty clear.So I decided that since the sun was out softening up all that ice, I would go out and do some removal. I also needed to capture some pictures to show Jim the conditions of the house/yard. This is the mound of ice in front of our house almost completely covering the crawl space vent and an outdoor spigot.
This has frozen pipes written all over it. Ugh.

The ice is melting off the roof, but the only downspout that is exposed is this one on the south side and you can see that it isn't doing much good. The gutters are full of ice. Ice dams are something I didn't think I needed to think about anymore. More Ugh.

And this downspout just goes under the ice. What are you supposed to do in a situation like this????

The north side of the garage has a healthy ice dam. Arg.

I blame the next part of my afternoon on the fact that I am a survivor. I lived in MN. I am trained and equiped to handle snow. So I pulled on my Sorrells, (wish I had some Choppers) and got out the "ICE MUTT" (real name) to bust out some of this ice. I can handle this! Hear me roar. Just wanted to show exactly how much Ice we were talking about. 1.5 inches.

And after an entire hour of pounding away, I cleared this much ice off the drive. Didn't even make it over to the sidewalk. I thought this was a pretty good accomplishment.....

...until I went to the end of the driveway. A drop in the bucket. I should have just stayed inside in front of the big TV.

The kids are enjoying the ice. They have found that even the smallest hill is pretty good for sledding and going far. It's just tough getting back up that hill.

Sledding action.

The uneventful update

There really hasn't been much going on around here. That's the reason for lack of updates. I can report on this. We survived the storm of the century of the month. We were hit with the ice on Monday night. Everyone stayed home on Tuesday. The kids played with the neighbor girls all day (we even ate dinner with them). I cleaned and washed and cleaned and cooked. I knew that we would be home a couple of days and I wanted to get all the work out of the way so we could play. Wednesday rolled around and we were in full on sloth mode. Evie read some books to Annalise and I was wearing my second sweat suit of the week. Bliss.
Jim stayed home on Wednesday too. He even delayed a trip to MN until Thursday so he could be sure to get out safely. While I was on my second sweat suit (and shower), Jim rode this storm out in the same clothes and no shower. Good thing he didn't wander too far from his computer with his stinky-ness.

Here's some ice on our trees. The kids didn't have school again today ( Thursday). Because of the difficultly of cleaning up this ice, they are on a two hour delay again tomorrow. They have really enjoyed skating around on the ice. i was impressed that no one had hurt themselves.....until tonight. We returned from gymnastics, which wasn't canceled--yay, and I decided to see if I could chip some ice off the drive. Evie was excited about the big chunks of ice. Perhaps too excited because she slipped and caught herself on her chin. She was bleeding and convinced herself that she spilt her chin and needed stitches. I am happy to report that she only scraped her chin and has a big old band aid now. Here's hoping that she's the only one that slips.